There was also an unconfirmed account pending from Pakistan as well, as soon as I saw "-PK" in the Whois report, I just deleted it. It was only AFTERWARDS that I checked StopForumSpam and sure enough, there it was.

I wonder if that country has .ANY. legitimate Internet users?

If you don't know what eschatology is then don't worry; it's not the end of the world.Purveyor of fine sarcasm since 1966.

OK, just added a new profile field as follows, mandatory at registration:

I am not a spammer: *You accept that, by joining this forum, you will not use it as a platform from which to post or send spam. You accept that an Admin may delete your account and posts without warning if spamming activity is suspected.

Two values - "I accept" and "I decline" with "I decline" being the default. No validation, but it gives us the right to just delete spammers on sight (as we have been doing) if we suspect a spammer. Wish it was possible to ban the entire country of Pakistan - AFAIK nobody has ever known a legitimate member to come from that country.

If you don't know what eschatology is then don't worry; it's not the end of the world.Purveyor of fine sarcasm since 1966.

Thanks Suvi,Looks like that one was from California (not the usual Pakistan).

Could have been a human spammer - they do exist and because CAPTCHA questions are designed to be answerable easily by humans but not machines.

If a program tries to break into a forum and fails, it'll generate a report of the fact.That can then be fed to human mules who will do the honours of seeing what CAPTCHA system is in use ... if it's popular enought, the spambots will be coded to cater for it in future releases.

On this board, we use a simple question and answer type mechanism. Here is an example of a really BAD question:Q: What do you get if you add fourteen to six?The answer to this can be worked out by parsing the question, or searching Google.Here's a much better question:Q: Retype the following text, replacing all the digits with spaces: Spammers3must7dieIt's immediately obvious that a human can solve this very quickly but it would take some coding for a bot to decipher it. If only one or two forums are using questions of that nature, then it's not cost effective for them and they'll leave you alone.

Most visual CAPTCHAs (including the very popular reCAPTCHA) have been broken and are thus useless, as well as not being accessible to partially-sighted folk.

If you don't know what eschatology is then don't worry; it's not the end of the world.Purveyor of fine sarcasm since 1966.